PS

Wesley Kirkland

Solutions Architect & Security Researcher

About Me

Solutions Architect

Wesley Kirkland headshot

History

Wesley Kirkland started his career back in 2013 working as a lonely intern racking and stacking servers. Throughout the years he quickly advanced through his company and eventually found an all-star team to work with. Today he is a Solutions Architect working with AWS, Next.js, and Python with various other technologies blending hands-on problem-solving with big-picture architecture. I'm a hands on problem solver both are work and around the house. When I'm not at my day job I'm running ETSA for my local community. Or I'm deep into a personal project or tackling endless house upgrades.. At the end of the day I get to see myy crew of my beautiful wife, and our 4 beautiful fur babies kitties each with a name as whimsical as their personalities.

Skills

Technical Skills

  • Solutions and Cloud Architecture
  • PowerShell Scripting & Automation
  • Microsoft O365 & Exchange Administration
  • Observability and Monitoring
  • Relational Database Management
  • CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery)
  • AWS Cloud Services
  • IAM (Identity and Access Management)
  • Active Directory Management

Specializations

  • Security Research & Vulnerability Assessment
  • SSO & SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)
  • Windows Server Administration
  • Virtualization Technologies (VMWare, Containerization)
  • Documentation, SOPs, & Process Improvement
  • System Architecture
  • Networking (On-Premise & Cloud)
  • Web Presence (Domain Names, DNS, and Redirects)

Current Focus

Currently working as a Solutions Architect, focusing on:

  • Managing complex AWS Infrastructure in a HIPPA and SOC II environment
  • Increasing observability through distributed tracing, synthetic tests, and enhanced logging
  • Create and optimize variablized CI/CD pipelines for deployment workflows
  • Lead the team through humility, blameless actions, knowledge sharing sessions, while contributing as a primary individual contributor

Experience Highlights

  • Orchestrated consolidation of 150+ email domains and migration of 2,000+ mailboxes, enhancing email and calendar functionality for 700+ users across the enterprise using a combination of O365, Mimecast, and dmarcian technologies.
  • Collaborated with developers to reduce SQL connections from 300K/min to approximately 1K/min
  • Increased system observability through distributed tracing and proactive incident management, reducing critical incidents by 75%
  • Security research, disclosures, and remediation collaboration

Certifications

Fun Fact

“Meme Master of Disaster” - Because sometimes the best way to deal with IT disasters is with a good sense of humor and the right PowerShell script! 🚀

My favorite Icebreakers are:

  • One of my cats is “famous” on Amazon
  • I'm a published Author
  • I bought this domain before I knew anything about ccTLDs and domains. To this day I find websites with invalid regex patterns refusing my email address.